The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-user as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices.
An enterprise storage cloud is typically shared across multiple users and/or customers. This sharing may happen at different levels: at the file system level, at the network level, at the storage controller level, at the hard disk drive level, etc. In such a shared environment, a cloud management system needs to be appropriately configured such that the workload of one user does not have a negative impact on the performance of another user's workload. Current methods for performance isolation in a cloud environment are impromptu and often rely on over-provisioning of system resources, which results in lower system utilization and higher cost.